The current state of the art in the pertinent technology (including commercial, Government and research software systems) offers specialized solutions for addressing specific aspects of Command and Control (“C2”), Exercise Planning and Operations, Situational Awareness, Decision Support or Human Terrain Mapping. For example:                The Command Post of the Future (“CPOF”) tool offers battalion commanders an executive level decision support system providing situational awareness and collaborative tools to support decision making.        TiGRNET helps brigades share pictures, text and maps of what soldiers are observing while on patrol to enhance tactical level situational awareness.        The Army's Distributed Common Ground Systems (“DCGS-A”) is the Army's primary system for tasking, processing, correlating, integrating, exploiting, and disseminating (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) assets and information. The DCGS-A enables the ground commander to access multiple sources of data, information, and intelligence, and facilitates development of situational understanding by allowing the commander to visualize, analyze, and understand the threat and environment, predict threat intentions, execute targeting, conduct ISR integration, and support information operations.        The Joint Master Scenario Event List (“JMSEL”) is an automated system specifically designed to assist in Master Scenario Event List (“MSEL”) management. The MSEL is a collection of pre-scripted events intended to guide an exercise toward specific outcomes. The JMSEL tool facilitates the work of Exercise Planners and supports execution of exercises with simple, easy to use functions.        AXIS PRO (Analysis and eXploration of Information Sources Professional) enables intelligence analysts to find data of interest, organize and refine the results, and then visualize the results and detect patterns. Its capabilities include link, temporal, pattern and geospatial analysis tools, net-centric alarm and alerts, entity and relationship extraction from text documents, and an integrated web portal for information searching and sharing.        
Currently, similar technologies do not address the breadth and depth of the effort required in planning, executing and conducting after action reviews (“AARs”) of tasks in full-spectrum military operations spanning Insurgency Operations, Civil Military Affairs, Information Operations, and Capacity Building. In particular, the technologies currently available have one or more of the following limitations:                Highly Specialized: The current state of the art systems address specific aspects of Command and Control (“C2”), Combat Planning and Operations, Situational Awareness, Decision Support or Human Terrain Mapping, and do not exploit the commonality inherent across these domains. Consequently, the military is forced to use multiple tools to enable planning, executing and conducting after-action-reviews in modern full-spectrum operations.        Stovepipe Architectures: The current state of the art systems typically do not easily interface with one another, and are built on heterogeneous computing platforms. This increases effort and time involved with using these tools in tandem with one another. In an environment where their operational configuration and capabilities are being constantly upgraded, issues of configuration management and information assurance further degrade the value of these “stovepipe” solutions.        Incomplete Echelon Support: The current state of the art systems typically provide strongest support at a specific military echelon. For example, CPOF is focused at the battalion level, whereas TIGRNet is focused at the individual war fighter/company level.        Lack of Full Spectrum Support: Today's military is forced to operate in a complex global environment marked by persistent conflict that requires capabilities for full spectrum operations. The current state of the art systems provide strongest support for a specific type of conflict. For example, CPOF provides excellent support for conventional combat operations (force of force) in general war conditions, but is of limited value in irregular warfare (insurgency conditions), peace operations, limited intervention (during unstable peace conditions), and peacetime military engagement (during stable peace conditions). The value of TiGRNET and AXIS PRO are complementary to CPOFs.        
The present invention is directed toward overcoming one or more of the above-identified problems.
The present invention provides one information framework that combines and links a variety of data related to tasks, events, timelines, human terrain, imagery, maps, social networks and more, to enable automating task planning, execution and conducting after action reviews (“AARs”) in full-spectrum military operations and exercises spanning major combat operations (e.g., in general war conditions), irregular warfare (e.g., in insurgency conditions), peace operations and limited intervention (e.g., during unstable peace conditions), and peacetime military engagement (e.g., during stable peace conditions). The present invention accomplishes this by using an event-driven data architecture that is linked with and driven by events as they occur during a military operation or exercise. For instance, local citizenry are linked to scenario events (e.g., smuggling, kidnapping, IED attacks, etc.), locations (e.g., home, work, etc.), organizations (e.g., business, criminal, social, municipal, insurgent, etc.), as well as other citizenry (e.g., social network, etc.). This enables changes to the data model to be automatically triggered by events, and the changes to then be automatically propagated across the entire data model using links.
For example, the stopping of a truck driver role player who is carrying fertilizer could result in the disruption of an IED, thus making an event, which in turn could prevent loss of life among local citizenry caused by the planned IED attack. This can further manifest at a macro level as a favorable change in the attitude of the local citizenry towards US forces. The present invention enables such complex social and demographic behavior to be modeled using an event-driven, linked data model, and it supports capabilities for managing and visualizing this information (using a variety of devices such as, but not limited to, flowcharts, organization charts, Gantt charts, social network diagrams, geographical information overlaid on maps and satellite imagery, etc.) to enhance Command and Control (“C2”), Planning and Operations, Situational Awareness, and Decision Support.
The present invention also has tremendous potential in applications to non-military operations involving, for example, civil disaster relief efforts, pandemic tracking and control, and law enforcement, to name just a few. Sample scenarios have been developed for tracking of the H1N1 virus for the Centers for Disease Control, and training for Mexican Police Officers for the U.S. Department of State.